CfP: NETWORKS OF POWER and KNOWLEDGE

Keynote Speaker: Kazys Varnelis

Deadline: January 3, 2018

The fourth biennial graduate conference of the Planning and Architecture Research Group (P+ARG) of University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning welcomes graduate student contributions on the theme of “Networks of Power and Knowledge.” This interdisciplinary conference engages the fields of architecture and planning, as well as neighboring fields from the humanities and social sciences.

Knowledge in architecture and planning moves. It moves through networks of power and capital, through corporate establishments, governmental alliances, international organizations, transnational social movements, and media and technology. These networks of power deconstruct and restructure forms and relations of production—emergent and old. They also produce new social and material assemblages within which spatial knowledge is constantly re-visited and re-organized. The resulting socio-technical formations ultimately reconfigure both the products of, and knowledge within, the fields of architecture, planning, and affiliated disciplines.

How do we understand the networks of power and knowledge and the implicit human condition that sustains and transforms architecture and planning practices? At a juncture where our logic and systems of production are becoming digitized and automatized at an unprecedented pace, and when our understanding of the networks and technologies of information are increasingly inseparable from questions of hardware and software, of the accumulation and classification of electronic data, the human mediation of knowledge acquires a new significance. The global phenomenon of post-truth politics equally urges us to re-scrutinize the Foucauldian premise of “knowledge as power.”

In this highly networked era of the Anthropocene, we want to explore the interactions between people, ideas, institutions, infrastructures and material objects, especially as these pertain to architecture and planning knowledge, in order to reflect on issues including but not limited to: political economies, ecologies and geographies, poverty, inequality, warfare, mass re/dis-location of people, invasion and occupation of lands and territories.

We invite graduate students at different stages of study in the U.S. and abroad. We welcome contributions spanning across history to the present, and encourage cross-cultural, cross-continental and interdisciplinary perspectives on the networks of power and knowledge within the built environment.

Please submit an abstract (300 words max.) along with a resume (250 words max.) to parg-taub@umich.edu by January 3, 2018. Applicants will be notified of the status of their submission by January 10, 2018.

While no travel stipend can be offered to accepted presenters, Taubman College extends free registration for this event to all participants. The events will take place over course of two days, with a commencing keynote address by Kazys Varnelis and a colloquium on the first day, followed by a day-long series of panels and breakout sessions with graduate students, Taubman College and U-M faculty.